Living in the tenth century. Mentalities and social orders

In his series of lectures, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Michel Foucault employs concepts from the military field of knowledge in order to analyse the founding scenes of psychiatry. I focus on three issues connected to Foucault's use of these military terms. Firstly, I examine why Foucault was reluctant to use concepts from sociology and psychology in Le pouvoir psychiatrique and how this affects the notions that he had formulated in his earlier work, Histoire de la folie. Secondly, I show how he challenges traditional understandings of the founding scenes of psychiatry by using concepts from a different field of knowledge. In doing this, he creates metaphors, and this is something that he himself had previously been critical of doing. Thirdly, I reflect upon the fact that Foucault's creative use of concepts from different disciplines and examples from different historical times can be related to episodes in his own life; I argue why it is important to supplement a structural analysis with linguistic, phenomenological and hermeneutical ones.     

Cooper v. Aaron (1958): A Hidden Story of Unanimity and Division

Contemporary and later commentators emphasized the Supreme Court's forceful affirmation of its own authority in Cooper v. Aaron (1958). The case was the Court's first significant test of states' rights opposition denying that Brown v. Board of Education (1954) (Brown I) and the Brown II (1955) decree permitting gradual implementation were legitimate constitutional law. Indeed, following the Court's announcement of Cooper v. Aaron in September 1958, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus and his followers closed the very same Little Rock schools the Supreme Court had ordered desegregated. Black students' rights did not prevail until summer 1959. In Arkansas and elsewhere, defiance initially triumphed over the Supreme Court's self‐assertive power. ¹     

Thomas Hobbes and the Term ‘Right Reason’: Participation to Calculation

Three times between 1640 and 1651, once at considerable length, Hobbes used and accepted, and then mocked, repudiated and discarded, the ancient/medieval term recta ratio/right reason. These repeated fluctuations in his thinking and rhetorical strategy occurred during the writing of his three major treatises on moral and political theory, one additional note on the term in De Cive, and an unpublished commentary on Thomas White's De Mundo. They are made obvious by his substitution of recta ratio for reason or natural reason when recycling passages from Elements of the Law for use in De Cive, and by his subsequent reversal of that substitution when revising other passages in De Cive for use in Leviathan. Despite incorporating recta ratio as a structural element in De Cive, he finally reverted in Leviathan to regarding the term as a deceptive verbal construct, non-existent in rerum natura, and ridiculing its users and proponents. Right reason carried connotations linked to it in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and Hobbes's reversals in his view and use of it, and his final dismissal of it, provide further evidence and justification for the now familiar modern claim that he was a herald of modernity.     

Des Considérations inactuelles au coeur de l'Occupation: Le Cogito à rebours d'Hélène Berr

Written in Paris during the darkest moments of the German Occupation, but only published in 2008, Hélène Berr's Journal was immediately hailed for its dramatic testimony and striking insights. With precision and lucidity, the young Jewish student at the Sorbonne records the human tragedies unfolding all around her in the wake of the Holocaust, while at the same time reviewing her own manner of experiencing these traumatic events through her personal reflections and emotions. The present article analyses her astute and poignant observations in the light of Emmanuel Lévinas's notion of the ethically grounded subject. Beyond its documentary value, Hélène Berr's Journal thus takes on significant philosophical dimensions. At the same time, Lévinas's concept of the Other's incursion into the realm of the self proves to be firmly anchored in the firsthand experience of the twentieth century's greatest historical catastrophe.

Écrit aux jours les plus sombres de l'Occupation de Paris, mais publié en 2008 seulement, le Journal d'Hélène Berr s'est tout de suite présenté comme un insigne témoignage. De manière aussi précise que perspicace, Hélène note les drames qui se déroulent tout autour d'elle tout en revenant sur tout ce qu'elle parvient à vivre et à penser au jour le jour. Nous nous proposons de lire ce Journal à la lumière d'Emmanuel Lévinas et de découvrir ainsi la profondeur non seulement humaine mais aussi philosophique de ce carnet intime tout en confirmant l'ancrage de la pensée de l'Autre dans le vécu historique de la plus grande catastrophe du XXième siècle.     

Democracy in Justice Kennedy's America: Reading Obergefell with Tocqueville

Justice Anthony Kennedy cites Alexis de Tocqueville in support of the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges. But Kennedy's citation leaves much out of Tocqueville's original text. Looking at what Kennedy erases in his quotation of Tocqueville indicates some of the broader cultural and historic erasures that are present in the Obergefell decision (and in the Supreme Court's latter-day treatment of marriage and the family in general). Standing Obergefell next to Tocqueville yields suggestive possibilities for evaluating the evolution of recent Supreme Court jurisprudence—and recent American political thought, more generally speaking—on questions of marriage and family. Specifically, reading Obergefell with Tocqueville reveals the intellectual and political weakness of the contemporary Supreme Court.     

La critique de l'idolâtrie des jeux scéniques dans le de civitate dei. destinataires et enjeux

Contrairement à son aîné Tertullien, saint Augustin ne consacre pas de longs développements à démontrer l'origine religieuse des jeux antiques. De nombreux passages du De civitate Dei font cependant exception ; l'auteur tente ici d'en rendre compte. Saint Augustin y vise le paganisme que la chute de Rome et la venue en Afrique du cercle sénatorial de Volusien ont rendu plus vivace. L'évêque d'Hippone mêle dans ses attaques une érudition purement livresque et des souvenirs personnels, grâce auxquels il démontre, contre toute évidence, le caractère religieux des jeux offerts par les notables des cités africaines. Le débat n ‘est pourtant pas déjà anachronique car, pour n'être pas religieux, les jeux n'en sont pas moins liés au paganisme du patriotisme urbain qui constitue la véritable cible de saint Augustin. A la cité terrestre comme absolu, il oppose l'idée de la vie comme peregrinatio, sans attaches, en marche dans l'espoir de la cité céleste.     

Accounts of early Christian history in the thought of François Guizot,Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël 1800–c.1833

This article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polythéisme romain (1833) that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this view and came to see the early Christians as demonstrating the inherently social nature of all religious practice. Some of these ideas were anticipated by Madame de Staël in De la littérature (1800), but all three thinkers sought to reintegrate religion into their ideas of modern liberty in ways that merit greater attention.     

The cult of images in light of pictorial graffiti at Doué‐la‐Fontaine

In the late 1960s the archeologist Michel de Boüard excavated a motte at Doué‐la‐Fontaine, near Saumur. Buried within the earthen mound was a stone edifice that, between the mid‐tenth and early eleventh centuries, had been transformed from a single‐storey aristocratic residence to a multi‐storey tower better suited to new military needs. De Boüard there discovered pictorial graffiti, incised in rough plaster across a wall in the blinded ground storey; among them were several unusually elaborate compositions. Building on his perspicacious analysis of the physical evidence, I situate the graffiti, dating from c.1000, in the wider matrix of contemporary visual and religious culture. The material enriches our understanding of a major historical phenomenon for which the millennial era is a watershed, namely the emergence and proliferation of cult images.     

Clowning and tragic clowning: Miguel de Unamuno as a funny writer

ABSTRACT

The present study considers the role and function that humor has in Unamuno's intellectual and literary universe. It traces Unamuno's attitude toward humor to his reading of the Spanish character in En torno al casticismo (1895) and to his dialogue with the figure of Don Quixote, as found in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905) and Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912). Finally, it looks at the theory of humor offered in the novel Niebla (1914) and also at the role that humor played in Unamuno's later political writings, especially those of exile (1924–1930).     

The Art of Contested Histories: In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] and the Pacific Legacy

ABSTRACT

European artists of the eighteenth century framed an exotic textual and visual narrative of the Pacific, drawing largely on knowledge gained from exploratory journeys of the 1760s and 1770s. Visual representations of the Pacific became socially fashionable and commercially successful. The French wallpaper manufacturer, Dufour, captured this commercial potential in a dramatic, panoramic wallpaper that told stories of European encounters with Pacific peoples: Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1804). Yet it was selective, defining the Pacific by moments of contact with Cook and other explorers. Lisa Reihana's In Pursuit of Venus [Infected] (2015–17) dramatically interrogates the eighteenth-century narrative of the Pacific, responding to Dufour's wallpaper in a complex, panoramic work. By attending to ways in which the factual and speculative are brought together in Enlightenment artefacts and Reihana's restaging of them, we explore how art might be put to use in the service of historical interpretation.     

Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court's Gender Discrimination Cases

For the most part, punctuated equilibrium scholarship has ignored the legal policy change generated by the Supreme Court. In this study, I address this gap though an examination of the Court's equal protection and gender cases from the 1970s. My case study here has two aims. First, I offer an adaptation of the jurisprudential regimes framework as a device for framing and identifying legal policy punctuations. After identifying Reed v. Reed (1971) as the cut point of such a regime, I then use Reed and its progeny to illustrate the promise of culture in explaining stasis and change, specifically focusing on the concepts of cultural cognition and cultural surprise.     

Putting the Roman periphery on the map: the geography of Romanness,orthodoxy, and legitimacy in Victricius of Rouen's De Laude sanctorum

Victricius of Rouen's De laude sanctorum (c.396) contains an original discussion of the cult of relics, introduced by a brief excursus on his recent trip to Britain. In this article, I argue that the author used both sections to define two symbolic territories, Britain and the centre of the empire, which invited his audience to think geographically about the concepts of Romanness, orthodoxy, and legitimacy. Exploiting a long‐standing tradition of stereotypes and geographical imaginations, Victricius used his argument of the unity of relics to justify his position in the Felician controversy, a contemporary episcopal and political conflict.     

‘Vienen de gente de mucha discreción y entendimiento:’ ethnic identity,ambivalence, and colonial discourses in Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala

Diego Muñoz Camargo's Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1585) is a well-known reference on the history of Tlaxcala that scholars have studied to better understand Tlaxcalan participation in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, its relationship with the Spanish Crown, and the author's selective approach to local history. Often, these approaches present the historian as acculturated or Hispanized because of his celebration of the Spanish or criticism of local religious practices. This article complicates such approaches in order to show the complex ways that the author approached issues of cultural difference. Examining Muñoz Camargo's recourse to colonial discourses of morality, I argue that the author molds and tailors these discourses to fit local Tlaxcalan circumstances. In doing so, I show how he humanizes Tlaxcala's ruling elite while exemplifying the inherent ambivalence of moral authority in Colonial New Spain.     

Michel de Certeau and the Limits of Historical Representation

The polymath Michel de Certeau is traditionally seen as one of a group of French post‐structuralist thinkers who reject constructs in the social sciences in favor of the diversity of the everyday or the past. However, in this paper I will show that, as a historian, Certeau did not discard these constructs, but rather valued them as a means of doing justice to the “strangeness” of the past. The position that Certeau adopts can be seen most clearly from his theoretical debate with Paul Veyne, which is the starting point of this article. I then show how Certeau's first major historical work, The Possession at Loudun, exemplifies his theoretical position. An analysis of this work demonstrates how the historian's active reconstruction of interactions between exorcists, medical doctors, state officers, and possessed nuns helps us to perceive the complexity of the past in a way that can be seen as a microhistory avant la lettre. I will suggest that during his writing of the history of Loudun, Certeau implicitly raises more theoretical and epistemological problems, and in so doing he “practices” a theory of history. The most elusive aspect of the story at Loudun turns out to be the drama around the priest Grandier. This article demonstrates how Certeau pays tribute to Grandier by using “scientific” methods, thus showing the “limits of representation” through disciplinary means. Finally, the article explores the implications of Certeau's theory and practice of the writing of history for understanding historiography at large. The historian not only appears as a tramp who looks for remains that are forever lost to us, but is also a “scientist” who uses both models and concepts in order to put them to the test.     

Work,young people and neighbourhood representations

Extending ideas of social exclusion and cultural modelling, I demonstrate that work identities of young inner-city men and women are shaped by cultural representations of the neighbourhood. I explore, in particular, the internal and external representations of culture and neighbourhoods, and the relationship between the two forms of representation. Empirical research focuses on two inner-city neighbourhoods of San Antonio, Texas. I present data from in-depth interviews with twenty-nine young Latinos and Latinas and seventeen representatives of community-based institutions. The results reveal that place is an important mechanism in the production of work identities. By considering the contingency of norms of success and marginality, the paper critiques underclass and culture-ofpoverty concepts. À partir de concepts d'exclusion sociale et de modélisation culturelle, je démontre que, pour les jeunes provenant de quartiers urbains défavorisés, les identités reliées au travail sont influencées par les représentations culturelles de leur environnement. J'examine en particulier les représentations internes et externes de culture et quartier, ainsi que la relation entre ces deux formes de représentation. Mes recherches empiriques sont axées sur deux quartiers dévaforisés de San Antonio, Texas. Je présente des données tirées d'entrevues détaillées avec vingt-neuf jeunes hommes et femmes Latinose et dix-sept représentants d'institutions communautaires. Les résultats indiquent que l'identification au lieu est un mécanisme important dans la formation d'identités reliées au travail. En examinant comment les normes de succès et de marginalité varient selon l'environne-ment, cet article questionne les concepts de sous-classe et de culture de la pauvreté. Ampliando ideas sobre exclusión social y moldeamiento cultural, demuestro que las identidades de trabajo de los jóvenes hombres y mujeres de barrios marginales son moldeadas por representaciones culturales de la vecindad. Examino, principalmente, las representaciones internas y externas de cultura y vecindades y la relación entre las dos formas de representación. La investigacion empírica tiene como enfoque dos barrios de San Antonio, Texas. Incluyo datos sacados de entrevistas largas con 29 Latinos y Latinas jóvenes y 17 representantes de instituciones basadas en la comunidad. Los resultados revelan que el lugar es un mecanismo muy importante en la producción de identidades de trabajo. Por una consideración de la contingencia de normas de éxito y marginación el papel critica ideas de clases marginadas y la cultura de pobreza.     

Jean Lemaire de Belges's Rhetorical Masks in L’Amant Vert and “Les Regretz de la Dame Infortunée”

A prominent feature of the poetry of Franco-Burgundian poet and rhetorician Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–1524) is his use of a rhetorical mask—a persona—through which to proffer his utterances and assert his identity. Because the early sixteenth-century court poet's financially and politically subservient position vis-à-vis powerful aristocratic patrons demands an encomiastic rhetoric that leaves little room for the poet's self-assertion within the body of the poetic text, Lemaire must employ the indirect means of a narrative mask to assert his own existence and concerns. This article examines first the narrative mask of the parrot-lover in the 1505 Epîtres de l’Amant Vert, through which Lemaire is able to voice concerns about his precarious position as a writer almost entirely at the mercy of his patron's good health and good will. A discussion of “Les Regretz de la Dame Infortunée” (1506) follows, in which Lemaire takes an intriguing narratological stance that unites his voice to that of his patroness, Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), ultimately forging an authorial je that speaks for both poet and patron. This nearly mystical union of narrative voices allows Lemaire to express his own concerns about the volatility of the patronage system while concomitantly giving voice to Margaret's mourning at the death of her brother, Philip the Handsome (1478–1506).     

Emmanuel de Martonne and the ethnographical cartography of central Europe (1917–1920)

Abstract

Emmanuel de Martonne is well known among geographers as the founding father of geomorphology and as one of Paul Vidal de la Blache's main disciples. He also played a central role as a geographical expert on the Comité d'études, a body set up by Deputy Charles Benoist during the First World War to prepare guidelines for the organization of peace and, in particular, the demarcation of boundaries. De Martonne's special expertise was the construction and comparison of ethnographical maps. He applied his theories on ethnic mapping and improved methods of representation of mixed minorities to his map of the Romanian nation published in 1919 by the Service Géographique de l'Armée. In his reports on Central Europe, de Martonne claimed neutrality, but the graphical options employed on his map offered a biased view of the Romanian nation, inspired mainly by the views of the French school of regional geography.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

La prudencia de Cortés: teoría política y práctica retórica en la Historia de la conquista de México de Antonio de Solís

The Historia de la conquista de México, published by Antonio de Solís in 1684, and later extensively reissued and translated, has been praised for the ‘elegance’ and ‘sweetness’ of its style. From very early on these qualities made the Historia to be read as a prose model worthy of imitation. Different scholars have studied Solís's sources and the way he manipulated them on the one hand, and, on the other, the extent of the reliability of his account. However, very little has been said about the actual writing practices of the Historia in the context of contemporary historiographical theories, or the author's own ideas about history or politics. This paper analyzes how some of these rhetorical techniques (I particularly focus on the use of oratio figurata, sententia, and epiphoneme) gave shape to Solís's political ideas, in particular the concept of prudence.     

Die Entdeckung des Unbewußten um 1900: Wissenschaftshistorische Anmerkungen zu Sigmund Freud

The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri F. Ellenberger has become a common topic in the historiography of (dynamic) psychiatry. But many users of this term have still the opinion that Sigmund Freud was the unique discoverer. In reality there was a scientific context at the fin de siècle, which corresponded intensively with Freud's original concepts and formed their implications (e.g. Darwinism, Neurophysiology). Besides well-documented synchronic analogies Freud implanted diachronic traditions within his psychoanalytic theory. Especially, his main work The Interpretation of Dreams implies Greek mythology as well as natural philosophy of romanticism. Freuds special concepts like ‘transfer’ and ‘resistance’ have to be analysed as historical metaphors.